Has Google Declared War on Facebook?

They’ve been eyeing each other across the way for years. Two 500lbs giant alpha-male gorillas with faeces in hand and ready to throw.

Did Google finally strike the first blow?

I was using Spreecast (a Google Hangouts competitor) few days ago, when I got an alert that Chrome is not fully compatible with all Spreecast functions. I found it curious, but I switched to Firefox and was on my merry way.

Then today, Facebook started acting all wonky in Chrome. Works fine in other browsers. So it got me thinking.

Has Google Declared War on Facebook?

So I decided to ask my friends on Facebook about it and got few mixed results.

It’s very much possible that Facebook is updating its code and the weirdness is caused by Facebook.

But it got me thinking. If Google declared a silent war on Facebook, could they pull it off? And if yes, how would they do it?

First Strike

According to Hitslink, Google Chrome controls about 17% of the browser marketshare.

It would be easy enough for Google to reject a piece of browser sub-technology in order to ensure lack of compatibility with its competitors.

We all remember Apple refusing to support Flash, don’t we?

Would Google Do It?

Well, I know for sure that they want to. After all, Google owned the world by the balls until Facebook change the game.

The culture of these here Interwebs gradually shifted from backlinks to sharing, all thanks to Facebook. Which left Google wondering “HEY! How come no one is linking to anyone anymore? How are we supposed to train our search algorithm without backlinks?”

By 2010, Google was moaning for the years gone by like a sinner on revival day. Which is why they scrambled to deploy their own sharing platform (G+) strictly so that they would compensate for the loss of backlinking signal.

Not to mention that Facebook basically said “F U” to Google when Google asked them to crawl Facebook profiles.

So, would Google love to stick it to Facebook? You bet.

And remember. We are not talking about faceless corporations here, because such a thing doesn’t exists.

We are talking about real people running these companies. Humans with emotions and grudges.

Corporations (and for that matter governments and nations) don’t have interests. People do. And I am sure few people at Google are very interested in sticking it to Facebook.